Video review: "Skyscraper"

I’ve frequently complained about Dwayne Johnson’s choices of role. After doing some interesting work during the early part of his movie career, he downshifted into musclebound lunkhead action roles, the sort of braggadocios alpha male type I’ve come to loathe onscreen -- basically, Schwarzenegger II.

Then he turns around and actually tackles a more complex part, playing a disabled ex-military guy with PTSD and a lot of self-doubt. And the movie bombs, at least at the domestic box office.

This is why no one should take career advice from movie critics.

Johnson plays Will Sawyer, an Army/FBI team leader who switched to designing security systems after an op went bad, leaving him with a prosthetic leg and a lot of regret. His buddy Ben (Pablo Schreiber) hooks him up to do the security work on The Pearl, a next-gen building in Hong Kong that will be the tallest in the world.

While they’re doing the final run-through some very “Die Hard”-esque international bad guys show up and start blasting the place apart with bullets and explosions. Will has brought along his family (Neve Campbell, McKenna Roberts and Noah Cottrell) for the trip, so of course they’re caught up in the peril.

The movie itself is a pretty straight-forward action/thriller, with plenty of fight scenes and CGI action. It’s nice to see Johnson -- or anyone, for that matter -- playing a hero who’s not automatically the most physically capable person in a room. And he even refrains from the usual quips, eye rolls and bicep-flexing that has become his M.O.

It’s not a great movie, and you kind of have to tuck your sense of logic aside at points. But “Skyscraper” is a genuinely entertaining FLICK with Dwayne Johnson showing a little ambition as an actor.

Bonus features are decent, cemented by a feature-length commentary track by director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who also worked with Johnson on “Central Intelligence.” Pity the actor didn’t join the director for this track. Thurber also provides commentary on a number of deleted or extended scenes.

There are also six making-of documentary shorts that focus on different aspects of production. The most interesting is a talk with Jeff Glasbrenner, the real-life amputee and motivational speaker who inspired the character of Will.

Movie:

Extras:

Review: "Skyscraper"

“In order to be brave, we gotta be a little scared.”

                        --Will Sawyer

My first thought about “Skyscraper” was that it looked dumb as a bag of rocks. And it is. But at least it’s a small bag.

I admit I liked this movie a lot more than I ever thought I would. It actually manages to coax a performance out of Dwayne Johnson that could be credible considered as… acting. No curled eyebrows, no winking at the audience, no ‘roided-up bicep flexing. He actually inhabits a character and invests him with something like dimensions.

All this is set against a backdrop of fires, explosions and machine guns, of course. The former WWE wrestler known as “The Rock” still knows his audience, who like the smell of his cooking, and insist that he keep on cooking that recipe -- or something.

(I never watched a lot of wrestling.)

Johnson plays Will Sawyer, a former military badass turned FBI badass who… got blown up in bad op, lost his leg and now has become a rather self-doubting family man. Looking a little thick in the face, with a scraggly grey beard and doe-ish eyes, Johnson manages to project a decent amount of vulnerability for a guy the size of an NFL linebacker.

“I just kinda put my sword down,” he says to his old squad mate, Ben (Pablo Schreiber), who has recruited him to do a security assessment of The Pearl -- the world’s newly christened tallest building, courtesy of an ambitious Hong Kong billionaire, Zhao Min Zhi (Chin Han). He even brings along his wife, Sarah (Neve Campbell), who’s also the military surgeon who saved his life, and their adorable, peril-prone moppets (McKenna Roberts, Noah Cottrell).

Of course, nefarious bad guys with vague European accents (Roland Møller chief among them) are up to no good, sealing off the building and setting the 96^th floor ablaze, while also disabling the fire control systems. The flames gradually higher as our hero battles the villains in a confined space while striving to protect his loved ones.

If all this sounds like “Die Hard” shotgun married to “Blazing Inferno,” that’s because it is.

Still, it’s hard to deny this is a fun flick. And it’s nice to see a character with a disability as the hero of an action thriller. Will gets around pretty well on his prosthetic leg, and even manages to use it as a prop several times during some of the more acrobatic sequences. Writer/director Rawson Marshall Thurber, who previously teamed with Johnson on “Central Intelligence,” resists the urge to have him take the leg off and start whacking bad guys with it.

Of course, you've got to swallow a lot of action movie stupidity along the way. Like a tall building being lit on fire in the middle, the flames gradually engulfing higher stories, yet somehow the superstructure remains perfectly intact without collapsing in on itself, as basic engineering principles would dictate.

It's not like there's a real-life contrary example from the recent past that literally every single person on Earth is aware of...

Speaking of which, I talked to a few people afterward who admit they were a bit triggered by the 9/11 resemblance. I was more bothered by the transgressions against Physics 101. 

Video review: "Contagion"

"Contagion" is a well-made science fiction thriller that engages the intellect better than must such films generally do, but sometimes fails to grab our hearts along with our brains.

Director Steven Soderbergh assembles a huge cast of stars -- including Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, Jude Law and Elliott Gould -- and sets them to encounter an outbreak of a deadly virus called MEV-1. The human population starts dropping like flies, and it's up to a loose consortium of scientists and government officials to race for a cure before mankind finds itself exterminated.

Screenwriter Scott Z. Burns cleverly doesn't go for the usual end-of-the-world tropes, in which the disaster is seen through the eyes of a small band of survivors. Instead, he offers a newsier docu-drama feel in which humanity's soaring grace and grimy faults are left to play out with logic and sobering authenticity.

People grow selfish and petty, and governments begin the task of coldly calculating which lives are worth saving and which are not. But amid the panic is self-sacrifice and generosity.

Even though it's better at making us think than letting audiences feel the characters' plight, "Contagion" remains an ambitious, worthy portrait of fear and hope.

Extra features are fair at best. The DVD edition comes with only a single featurette, "Contagion: How a Virus Changes the World."

Upgrade to the Blu-ray/DVD combo, and you add two more featurettes: "False Comfort Zone: The Reality of Contagion" and "The Contagion Detectives."

Obviously, that's not a lot of infectious enthusiasm on the part of the filmmakers to provide extra goodies for those who pass up the Redbox kiosk to plunk down money to add "Contagion" to their permanent video library.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 2 stars

Review: "Contagion"

"Contagion" is a gripping movie, but the things that make it good also limit how good it can be.

It's an attempt by director Steven Soderbergh, screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and a large ensemble cast to portray the outbreak of a world-wide epidemic in a realistic way rather than through a handful of descriptive characters and a melodramatic story arc. At this, it succeeds completely.

So instead of, say, a small group of survivors hacking their way through the remnants of a world turned upside down -- "28 Days Later" and "I Am Legend" are a couple of examples -- Soderbergh's film is a docu-drama that covers dozens of stories that intersect. This roving-eye approach allows us to observe as the populace grows uptight and scared, the government response becomes more and more sclerotic, and the center falls apart.

It's a sobering experience, watching heroic doctors and scientists racing against the clock to come up with a vaccine before the mathematical certainty of the disease's spread wipes the human race out. We also see the ugly side of humanity that reacts out of fear or avarice to exploit the situation -- such as Alan Krumwiede, a blogger played by Jude law who's convinced the government is controlling the situation to maximize pharmaceutical companies' profits.

(Great throwaway line from one of his targets: "Blogging isn't writing. It's graffiti with punctuation!")

But as engaging as this method of storytelling is on an intellectual level, the film often fails to grab us emotionally. Certain well-played scenes have power -- such as when one of the central characters, a crusading scientist working to solve the problem, becomes sick -- while others just sort of lay themselves out there, heavy on information but light on visceral impact.

And there's a few too many "science montages" of test tubes spinning in a centrifuge, specimens sealed in plastic, and people hobbling around in funny-looking environmental suits. Those scenes practically needed their own theme music.

I do respect the movie for its willingness to kill off characters without regard to the status of the actor who's playing them. Some famous faces end up thrown in a pit or on an autopsy table -- the latter being incredibly life-like and gruesome.

Likewise, some people who at first seem peripheral to the story, almost background characters, subtly nudge to the fore and become critical players. This "e pluribus unum" approach gives the film a realistic authenticity.

Matt Damon plays Mitch Emhoff, an unemployed house-husband whose wife, Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow), is one of the earliest people to contract the bug, later dubbed MEV-1. Only a partial list of other players includes Kate Winslet as an investigator with the Center for Disease Control, Laurence Fishburne as her do-gooder boss, Marion Cotillard as a World Health Organization expert, Chin Han as a Hong Kong official, Elliot Gould as a private researcher called in to help out, and Jennifer Ehle as a government researcher.

Interestingly, the movie has a few riffs on how such an outbreak might play out on the political front that tweak both the left and the right ends of the spectrum. There's some heartless corporations (are there any other kind in the movies?) looking to cash in, and at one point the nurses' union goes on strike, leaving dying patients in the lurch. Not to mention miles of government red tape to be sheared through.

Sounds crazy, but don't forget that part of the reason behind the slow response to Hurricane Katrina was that volunteer emergency workers were forced to sit through sexual harassment training before being sent to the Gulf.

"Contagion" uses an extreme situation to show us the breadth of our ragged humanity, its grace and its grubby failings. I just wish the movie could have been able to connect with hearts as well as it does heads.

3 stars out of four